Why the Joker Is a Career-Changing Role

And why Jared Leto is ready for it.

This week Warner Brothers announced its latest casting decision for the 2016 DC Comics mega-blockbuster, Suicide Squad, slated for 2016. Jared Leto will play the Joker. The other casting decisions for that movie passed without much bother, even though big names were involved—Will Smith for Deadshot, one of Batman's lesser-known opponents, and Tom Hardy, who already made his supervillain bones with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, as Rick Flag Jr. The Joker is special, though. In the age of the huge blockbuster, the part has become a breakout role for actors, a way of transitioning from the art house to the mainstream. Jared Leto, fresh off his Oscar win for The Dallas Buyers Club, is being elevated into a rarefied category: the actor who can bring high art to low culture. That's the unique opportunity that playing the Joker provides.

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The Joker has become a major part despite its goofy origin on the '60s Batman TV series. You can barely recognize the Joker we know now from the performance of Cesar Romero during that time:

It was Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Batman, of course, who defined the role as we've come to think of it now: an arch-criminal whose comedy comes out as psychopathology. Nicholson brought an incredibly ingenious combination of straight menace and laughs, which could not always be separated. Nearly a decade earlier he had played Jack Torrance in The Shining, so all the man had to do was raise his eyebrows to scare any audience half to death. He took the inherent threat that his face was capable of and pasted the comic impression on top of it, to wonderfully confounding effect.

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Nicholson brought a touch of the high artist to the Batman franchise, too. And it worked. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Nicholson's Joker breaks into a version of the Met Museum and desecrates the artwork. His anti-cultural impulse was not so different from the anti-art art of the late '80s and early '90s. You can see a reflection of that destructive elitism in one of the movie's better in-jokes: At the end of his graffiti spree, Nicholson's Joker spots a Francis Bacon canvas and decides to save it. "I kind of like this one, Bob," he says. "Leave it."

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When Heath Ledger took on the Joker role, he was supposed to be the Jack Nicholson for a new generation, which was exactly what he was shaping up to be until his tragic overdose. He, too, brought a dimension of high art that usually doesn't apply to supervillains. You can see it even in the way he walks out of a hospital that he's blowing up:

His insanity is genuinely threatening, and while the comic persona that Nicholson created for the Joker was replaced by Ledger's far more sinister characterization, the connection between humor and violence was even more clearly spelled out.

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Ledger was riffing on what Nicholson did before him. How could he not, given that everyone had seen Nicholson play the part? Nonetheless, he updated the character to fit the times perfectly. The menace of terrorist anarchy, of men who want to burn the world down, shaped his performance. Ledger's version of the Joker is a terrorist, whose absurdity is a rejection of the value of human life itself.

Superhero movies have a tendency to love grand themes—the power of technology to save or destroy us, the inherent contradiction of violence being restrained by violence, and of course that old chestnut, the value of friendship. But part of the Joker's appeal, the reason you can't really think about Batman without thinking about the Joker, is that the character himself is a great actor. He loves acting. Which is why great actors do great things with the role. There has not yet been a performance of the Joker that's not totally superb. How many roles can you say that about?

Leto is just weird enough, and clever enough, to bring a new sensibility to the role. It may seem like a leap from The Dallas Buyers Club to the Suicide Squad, but the Joker is a part that demands that kind of range. Given the increasing dominance of movies based on comic-book adaptations—and the willingness of studios to reboot them every 10 years or so—the role of the Joker has naturally taken on a kind of comparative function: Whenever somebody plays the Joker, the audience is automatically going to be comparing him to Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, which means you better get somebody good. The competition for Leto against his predecessors in the role is about as steep as it gets. It is a huge opportunity nonetheless: In a high-low culture, he has been given the ultimate high-low part.

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